The calm before the storm

Well here we are, I'm currently sitting in the middle of boxes, empty cupboards and drawers, and various appliances strewn all over the place. Tomorrow morning at 9AM the truck should arrive and the final part of my crazy Summer of Moving will be starting. It was something my ex and I had to do for our kids' sake, but doing two moves in the same summer is not something I want to do ever again. This means that starting tomorrow I'll be connection-less until Thursday evening, and as I start my next Dad Week on Friday I will not get much play time in this week. I have a feeling that I'll become a huge couch potato during the month of October!

In the little time I've had this weekend I got a in on a few kills, but not nearly as many as I would've liked because I've had to log in and out and get off early if I want to get anything done before tomorrow's moving storm. But still, fun was had. I also got back on Sisi for a bit to try various things both with and without my BOZO brothers and sisters. I really can't wait for all this moving stuff to be over and done with and do a really long roam in a big fleet. Now that summer is almost over action should be picking back up again, especially as we're approaching the Alliance Tournament and Fan Fest. The last tournament was when Tranquility got populated by over 50000 players for the first time, and with the player population slowly growing all the time I don't see why new records shouldn't be achieved.

Another event that's happening soon and that unfortunately I'll be missing is the 2nd annual BOZO Extravaganza. There may be a quiet weekend online for the BOZOs but I'm sure that Mexico will never be the same after BOZO's passage :)

So there ya go, a short update before I have to start unplugging stuff. Here's to an easy move, and good beer and pizza afterwards !!!

Fly safe if you're haulin'

o7

Hello Circus Tent !!!

Well it is now done, all my stuff, except for my Firetail, has been moved to BOZO HQ somewhere in Syndicate. And even before the courrier contracts were handled I was out there as tackler on a mini roam with some old BOZO buddies, and some new ones too. Without wanting to denigrate the work done by my previous alliance, AMC, I have to admit that I had missed this much more than I thought I did. I have also noticed that I did get rusty at flying an interceptor in fleet; sure it's like riding a bike but the chain does need to be oiled up once in a while, and my chain had to be de-gunked and re-lubed. I didn't do bad per se but I admit I was a bit slow on tackles and hitting buttons I shouldn't have, and also getting lag-bombed on a gate didn't help things, but still, getting on 4-5 killmails on my first night out isn't so bad, and yesterday night I basically had an Omen to myself with minor help from a Rapier, which means my Taranis was starting to look sort of like the one seen on this very header. I've seen worse starts!

So the reasons of why the change? It's pretty simple. I'm a PvPer who doesn't have the patience (read: lazy) to go solo looking or scanning for potential targets, and the list of things I absolutely can't stand (read: bores me to tears) is getting quite long. It's pretty easy: if The PvP in EVE wasn't as good as it is, I'd uninstall this thing and delete my character without even blinking. But when The PvP goes right and everything falls into place, EVE is just pure magic. The one event that told me "OK, I've had enough!" was when I was trying to get to a Hurricane I had left over in one of the wormhole systems we had recently moved from, the lost-and-found-again Emo Town, and one of its residents scanned down the hi-sec system entry point for me. Unfortunately he didn't stay online so while I had the system, I didn't have the location in space, so I said "Cool, I'll just scan the wormhole from the hi-sec side". The good part was that the entrance system was only 5-6 jumps away from the then-current location of our wormhole. But the fun ended right there. What followed was a nightmarish hour and a half of playing with scan probes to lock down a wormhole I knew was there, and it took me everything and the kitchen sink to finally have it at 100%. And when I warped to it and jumped, horror. No black hole. That meant only one thing: I was in the wrong system. I had wasted close to two hours scanning down the stupid thing to be rewarded with a big "Ha Ha, you fail". So Blackline Corp, I hope the Hurricane is useful; I hear they make great salvagers !!!

And of course on the Clown front there are some usual cries of "Carebear" and "Faggot", or both used together, but it's all good, I feel like I'm home again. I didn't really get to go out with a bang but I did do my best to come back in with one. So now I'll do my best to play as good as I can, shut up when I have to, and smack the crap out of my victims, and hopefully when the 30 day trial period is done I can be voted back in and be a full-on Bozo again.

Fly dangerous,

o7

Change in the air...

Notice the drum roll next to my little South Park avatar. Details are on the way once everything is official.

Some of you may guess where this is going... :)

Fly dangerous,

o7

20 million SP; the post that never was

As I'm slowly closing in on twenty-ONE million SP, I realize that I did not post my "State of Cozmik" article that I wanted to post just as Clown Punchers announced their little banter contest. And of course with things being extremely busy in Real Life even blogging time is at a prime so I'll take a short break before I attack the packing of my boys' clothes and toys, as well as picking up the debris left by the hurricane they made in the living room. Yep, as I mentioned before, this is not quite vacation!

So yeah, a couple weeks ago Cozmik R5 finally achieved the 20 million skill point barrier, not too long after getting the Vagabond decently skilled and rightly fitted (well to my taste; some people may tank it more than I do but mine is still a speedster), and once again it will be time to set my sights on the future and decide where I want to take the training. Right now Coz is training Medium Hybrid Turrets V because I also have Gallente Cruiser V, so when I got the HAC skill I was automatically able to fly the Deimos and Ishtar. Being a big fan of guns I want to get a Deimos first, but there's no way I'm buying one unless I can fit it right. Same with the Ishtar; I'm not getting one of these babies until I have all T2 drones with support skills trained up. I know drones are effective but I prefer guns so call me weird! After I get the Medium T2 Hybrids I will go back to training the Large T2 Projectiles for my Minmatar battleships and once that's done, I have to take a break from training new ships because I have to bump up a lot of support skills in a lot of categories. In the rush to get a newer ship or system trained up there's always something that gets put on the back-burner and I think that over the past say 6 months I've gotten my back-burner a bit too crowded so this will get straightened out.

Now, let's recapitulate the ships I've trained either completely or almost completely:

T1 frigates (Minnie V, Gal V, Caldari IV, Amarr III)

• Destroyer V (can fly Minnie and Gal interdictors)
• Interceptors
• Assault Ships
• Covert Ops (scanning skills need to get better, so do missile/bomb skills for the bomber)

T1 Cruisers (Minnie, Gal and Caldari... Amarr soon-ish)

• Heavy Interdictors
• Heavy Assault Cruisers
• Battlecruiser IV (again, Amarr soon-ish)

T1 Battleships (Minnie and Gal at III... yes I need IV before I can REALLY use them) with Remote-repair capability

When I cross-trained to Gallente I did make sure I had the T2 hybrid guns and T2 drones to go with the Taranis so from there I've tried to keep the hybrids up to par with my projectiles, but I did take the short-cut of skipping missile skills; it will be quite some time before I have decently fit Caldari ships or even a good Typhoon fit, but I don't mind because those ships are just so damn ugly that I don't even want to be seen in them; seriously, Caldari designers should be shot on sight and I would bet money that the 'Phoon designer was of Caldari blood! The Amarr ships are really interesting (got toasted by Absolutions enough on Sisi) but so far I have only very basic Lazer skills so it will be quite some time before I get a Scorch-firing Zealot Of The Pink Floyd.

So after I get my support skills sorted out, as well as some important ship skills to at least IV, here are the ships I'll have left to train up for before I decide (or not) to take the Capital Ship road:

• Electronic Attack Frigates: I may be skipping this because I'm not a huge fan. Apart from the Kitsune, I'll pass.
• Recon Ships: probably my next expensive ship after Cov Ops skills are straightened out.
• Command Ships: now that HAC is done, these aren't too far off. Must brush off some Leadership skills first though.
• Strategic Cruisers: testing on Sisi showed me I can fly one of those rather quickly, but they are quite a bit more than 600 ISK on Tranquility even if my alliance makes them. I can wait.
• T2 Battleships: I'm not a mission runner so screw the Marauder, and Black Ops are not much used. And anyway both are way too expensive. I can wait.

With that last one I guess I'll be training Battleship V for only two reasons: to get absolutely kick-ass T1 BSes, and opening the door to Capitals, even though I don't think I'll actually own one unless I get some massive money-making scheme going. I've done just enough POS operations (exactly one) to know that I absolutely hate them, and my playing schedule isn't exactly good for receiving a call at 4AM saying "get in your Naglfar, we're killing a Large POS in XX-123!". Cuz yeah, being an EVE gun-freak (I'm not one in Real Life) means I'd go to a Dreadnought before a Carrier. But even if I only have one for station spinning, a dread would be a cool ship to have because it would mean that all the smaller ships below it are trained up to the max, and who knows, maybe I'd be lucky and have a Mothership to shoot at!

And the Supercaps? Don't even think about it. To me, a Mom or a Titan means you have just sold your soul to a massively big alliance that is into all the "politicaillerie" shit that I absolutely hate about EVE. It's even worse than selling it to the devil! The only thing that interests me about Supercaps would be tackling one with my Broadsword and seeing my gang tearing it apart. Sure Titans are cool for the jump bridge thing but yeah... politics... (/me pulls out barf bag).

So there you have it, the on-going training of Cozmik summed up in one blog post. Sorry about the wall-o-text :)

Fly it like it's already dead,

o7

Cheap fun: the joys of Sisi

Recently my computer had the unfortunate mishap of having a hard drive catastrophic failure, and of course with the new hard drive everything got re-installed and updated, and of course I had a brand-spankin'-new, lemony-fresh EVE install. This was the perfect opportunity to copy my EVE folder and apply to it the patch to connect to Singularity, EVE's test server, also known as Sisi.

I had played a little on Sisi just prior to the Quantam Rise patch, mostly to see how the speed rebalance would affect the way I fly ships (FYI: not much!) and I didn't even go to the main testing system of FD-MLJ in Syndicate at the time. After QR somehow my Sisi folder refused to be updated, and even a new copy of my Tranquility install did not fix this. Since then I've had many things on my plate both in-game and out so only in this past week did I rejoin the Sisi mini-community. The fun part is that our alliance headquarters are close enough to Syndicate space that I didn't have to join the "moveme" channel, and it was actually fun to fly down to 0.0 in a brand new 100 ISK Hyperion (ok, maybe 15000 in modules)! And here lies the fun of testing stuff on Sisi: absolutely everything you can buy on the market is 100 ISK, and everything is available in quantities of 100 million units, or just slightly less. This causes something funny though: the most expensive part of any ship is now the ammo, and when you're a Minmatar/Gallente gun freak like me you eat ammo like pop corn. But let's just say that ISK isn't an issue on Sisi; if you're short on ISK for X-Y-Z reason just undock a battlecruiser or battleship (or dreadnought or carrier if you have the skills), self-destruct it, and the Secure Commerce Commission will keep you in replacement ships and modules for years to come!

So naturally, the first thing I did after docking and making some ships and items reserves was to go out and find action. This isn't exactly hard to do as there are about a dozen beacons out in space for various classes of ships' free-for-alls, and three beacons for consensual combat only. So off I go towards FFA1, where pretty much everything goes except capital ships, and land right on top of a Sleipnir command ship. He obviously had much better skills so he had a way better tank than I did, and the inevitable was going to happen even if he didn't receive help from an Absolution passing by:

Hyperion bleeding

Damn that was fun! But I hardly stopped there. With a little bit of training I just had to see what the hell those hi-falootin' Tech 3 ships were all about. I had gotten hold of the skillbooks even before making my way to Syndicate so about an hour after I got on Sisi I was able to fly a Loki, and an hour after that a Proteus:

Hellbringer (BattleTech players will get it :)

Ganky (picture a Deimos on both steroids and cocaine!)

I lost the Loki to a Legion, among other ships, but the fun part is the Legion blew up in unison with me in a symphony of T3 destruction. The Proteus did fare a tad better before its untimely demise: I went down to 2 Astartes, 1 Eos and an Absolution (did I mention these things are painful?), but not before I took down one of the Astartes with me:

Bye bye Astarte!

These days on Sisi we get to try the features of the up-coming summer patch known as Apocrypha 1.5, and the shining highlight of this patch will be the arrival of sized rigs. Up until now, putting rigs on something cheap like a Rifter or fragile like an interceptor was seen as either pure folly or a plain waste of ISK, but when the patch hits rigged assault frigates will become the norm in no time flat. Case in point, this Jaguar:

Mmmm... blood!

Yes this looks like a typical Jaguar, but I'm not releasing its little secrets yet. The player who pwnd my behind twice with it did though, and I thank him for it. Let's just say it can solo big things :) And along the same lines but quite differently fit, I built a solo-PvP Rifter that made mincemeat of a Cormorant, and right after had an epic battle with a Wolf.

And finally, getting on Singularity allowed me to view two ships I had never seen before, and probably never will again unless I join one of the big alliances, an Aeon mothership and an Erebus titan:

Huh..... BIG !!!

Look for a little dot just above the station's docking ring, it's my Loki! Yes, a screenshot just doesn't do a titan justice. The mothership itself is big, but nothing compared to the titan. And all the time the station is buzzing with activity, with all sorts of capital ships and faction ships you never usually see.

So if you've never been on Sisi before, do yourself a favor and join in the fun... er... testing!

Fly it like it's worth 100 ISK :))

o7

You call this vacation ?!?!

With the amount of painting and moving to be done, this vacation is anything but. I'll be posting a bit more regularly once the dust has settled, but let's just say that the month of August will utterly suck as far as gaming time goes. As it is my timing is always way off for any PvP; it usually happens when I log off for supper or do other stuff, and when I'm on I'm always wondering what to do because I know I have limited time, something which EVE is not exactly known to be good for. So I work the trade alt as much as I can, make sure the skill training is getting up to snuff, and when I really need to blow people up I go on Singularity and burn up a ridiculous amount of ships; good thing that the most expensive things about those ships is the ammo! I can even fly Lokis in there :)

So there you go, a quick update just to make sure you don't think I'm dead or something. Here's to hoping I win a custom-made Bozo shirt :))

Dangerous: the only way to fly

o7